breakfast-cups. Horace was
standing with one arm on the mantel-piece, gazing into the
fire; he had been silent during this short interview, but as
Madelon disappeared,--

"Is she at all like her mother?" he inquired.

"She is like--yes, certainly she is like; her eyes remind me of
Magdalen's--and yet she is unlike, too."

"You must be prepared," said Horace, after a moment's pause,
"to find her devoted to her father's memory; and not without
reason, I must say, for he was devoted to her, after his own
fashion. She thinks him absolute perfection; and, in fact, I
believe this escapade of hers to have been entirely founded on
precedents furnished by him."

"I think it is the most dreadful thing I ever heard of," said
Mrs. Treherne--"a child of that age alone in such a place!"

"Well, I really don't know," answered Graham, half laughing.
"I don't suppose it has done her much mischief; and of this I
am quite sure, that she had no idea of there being any more
harm in going to a gambling-table than in going for a walk."

"That appears to me the worst part of it, that a child should
have been brought up in such ignorance of right and wrong.
However, she can be taught differently."

"Certainly; but don't you think the teaching had better come
gradually?--it would break her heart, to begin with, to be told
her father was not everything she imagines--if indeed she could
be made to understand it just yet, which I doubt."

"Of course it would be cruel to shake a child's faith in her
father," answered Mrs. Treherne; "but she must learn it in
time. Monsieur Linders was one of the most worthless men that
ever lived, and Charles Moore was as bad, if not worse. I
wonder--good heavens, Horace, how one wonders at such things!--I
wonder what Magdalen had done that she should be left to the
mercy of two such men as those."

"Well, it is no fault of Madelon's, at any rate," Horace
began; and then stopped, as the door opened, and Madelon came
in. In her hand she carried a queer little bundle of
treasures, that she had brought away with her from the
convent--the old German's letter, the two that Horace had sent
her, and one or two other things, all tied together with a
silk thread.

"This is the letter," she said, selecting one from the packet,
and giving it to Mrs. Treherne. It was the one she had read in
the evening twilight in her convent cell last May. "I am
afraid there is no name on it, for there is no beginning nor
endi